Noctambulists and Other Fictions

By Peter Spielberg

The Noctambulists & Other Fictions is a collection of spare, deadpan tales in which life's absurdity acts as a gateway to an even more confounding reality. Here, social mores are recycled, like so much scrap metal, in the name of extremist conservation, gender roles are mere foggy memories, and one man's life's work is another's garage sale. Withholding is the story of a modern divorce - a sensible end to a sensible alliance. Cliff and Connie are little more to each other than the pair of birch armchairs they divide in their break-up. When their detachment begins to crack, however, their apartment is set ablaze, and love jumps through the window, in the guise of a female firefighter. In Vanishing, a man finds himself, during a power outage, alone in a soulless necropolis. With a bloody foot and his key broken off in the door of a dark and maze-like tenement, he manages to talk a hopeless poet out of suicide, but struggles to escape his own paralyzed life. The Noctambulists of the title story are the wards of nursing homes, turned out on the mercy of an unnamed city. Gangs of grizzled senior citizens roam the streets, and the rap of a cane at one's door at midnight could mea

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1573660973
• ISBN13: 9781573660976
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: F2c
• Length: 166 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A Happening Noctambulist

The dark humor showcasing wild scenarios that seem ever so plausible while at the same time critiquing our present societies acceptance of norms is exactly what Spielberg achieves. This is a good book that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. The realities Spielberg paints for the reader are fantastic yet believable, which allows for one to be wholly enveloped in the worlds created. In Apocrypha a runner is the only person who...

Not a Sleeper

Peter Spielberg presents seven stories all absurd and unrealistic, yet completely relevant as responses to contemporary modernity. Being one who is not a great fan of stories containing alternate realities and situations that are unlikely at best, I was surprised to find myself affected by this collection of stories. The high points of the collection are undoubtedly "Apocrypha", an interesting commentary on modern society's...

Noctambulisticious

Spielberg did a wonderful job of creating these fictions of altered reality and making them real to the reader. Each story addresses an issue of our reality and takes it to an extreme through fiction. I, personally, enjoyed the reoccurring theme of sleeping/dreams and how the characters (in each story) came to an epiphany or a personal conclusion after experiencing the effects of the altered state of reality. These stories,...